Interview with Lisa Robinson, NME, February 1975.

Q: Doesn’t all this wear you down?

John: Well, I’ve just come out of it. Last year, with me personal life and the Apple business, the Klein business, and the immigration business… I mean, you don’t want to admit it while it’s happening that that’s what’s making you go barmy. You’re still living every day and you think you’re just going to a party, then you end up throwing up in the toilet. Everything was excessive, and you’re not quite in control of yourself. You can’t lie back with the hangover and say, ‘Now why did this happen to me…?’

Q: It’s surprising that it didn’t get to you more.

John: Well, that was enough. I just woke up in the middle of it and thought, ‘There’s something wrong here. I better straighten myself out.’ After I deal with this last batch of lawsuits, I ain’t gonna have any more. I don’t know how they happen – one minute you’re talking to someone, the next minute they’re suing you.

Q: As far as your personal life is concerned, you seem ecstatic to be back here with Yoko?

John: Well I am. It’s like – and this is no disrespect to anybody else I was having relationships with – but I feel like I was running around with me head off, and now I’ve got me head back on.

Yoko and I were always in touch, either on the phone or in one way or another. I just sort of came home is what happened. It’s like I went out to get a coffee or a newspaper somewhere and it took a year – like Sinbad. I went on a boat and went around the world and had a mad trip, which I’m glad is over.

Yoko and I have known each other for nine years, which is a long friendship on any level. It was a long year, but it’s been a nine year relationship, a seven year marriage. Maybe it was the ‘seven year itch’. And apart from the pain we caused each other it probably helped us.

We knew we were getting back together. It was just a matter of when. We knew. Everybody else might not have, but we did.

Interview with Frances Schoenberger, March 1975.

John: They always say, ‘their marriage was a failure,’ at every divorce. Ours was the other way around; our separation was a failure. We knew we would get together one day, but it could have been 10 years. Like Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner. We could have gone that long. It was fate, or our decision, or whatever. I don’t know how it worked.

We knew we’d get back together one way or another, but had no idea when. We probably would never bother getting a divorce. I mean, if you’re living apart you are as divorced as can be.

May’s handling it alright. It’s hard to know, because I’m hardly spending any time with her. Any time at all, actually. But what can I do about it? She knew what the scene was from the start. There was no question.

Neither Yoko nor I left each other for another person. We just sort of blew up. Blew apart. And then sort of filled in, so as not to be alone at night.

I don’t wanna put May down. She is a nice girl. But she knew what the scene was. I was always talking to Yoko on the phone. I never went anywhere without telling her. ‘I’m going to L.A.’ And she said, ‘Good luck to you.’

So, we were still good friends. We just blew apart. We didn’t even plan to get back together. I was just going to visit her. And I visited her many times before. And I just walked in and thought, ‘I live here; this is my home. Here is Yoko, and here is me.

The other times I visited, we’ve spent hours together, but I haven’t been relaxed. The last time I went, I just never left. It was the same. I physically left Yoko in the apartment, but I didn’t leave her mentally. And she didn’t leave me.

Interview with David Sheff, October 1980.

Yoko: Yes, there was an 18 month break. Yes it was accurate that we were separated. But you see, when two people are separated, they automatically think that the guy left the girl and poor girl is suffering and she’s in tears, and she’s so glad that he came back, or that classic style.

John: We talked about it and she kicked me out is what actually happened.

Yoko: I really needed some space because I was used to being an artist and free and all that. And when I got together with John, because we’re always in the public eye, I lost the freedom. Both of us were together all the time, twenty-four hours a day. The pressure was particularly strong on me because of being the one who stole John Lennon from the public. I was under very strong pressure and my artwork suffered too as a result of that. I suffered a lot and so I thought I that I wanted to be free from all that. I needed the space to think. I thought it would be a good idea that he would go to LA and just leave me alone for a while.

John: At first I thought, ‘Oh!’ you know, ‘Bachelor Life! Whoopee, whoopee.’ And then I woke up one day and I thought, ‘What is this? What is this? I want to go home.’ But she wouldn’t let me home. That’s why it was eighteen months instead of six. Because we were talking all the time on the phone and I kept saying you know ‘I don’t like this you know I can’t. You know I’m out of control, I’m drinking, and I’m getting into trouble, and I’d like to come home, please.’

She’s saying, ‘You’re not ready to come home.’ ‘What are you saying?’ you know. ‘OK, back in the bottle.’ In the meantime I’m going to pieces and she’s just carrying on, functioning normally and I’m falling to pieces and whoring it up.

Yoko: The thing that hurt me the most was the fact that the reporters were writing about ‘the poor deserted wife’. And wherever I’d go they’d all look at me with ‘Oh, I’m so sorry for you; she must be suffering.’ And that’s very insulting and humiliating to a woman.

I cared for John very much. And also I didn’t want to break that image and come out and say ‘Well actually I’m the one who kicked him out and he’s the one that’s suffering.’ It’s always in bad taste to do that. So I have endured all situations without protesting. Even now when reporters ask about it they say, ‘Did you ever think he would ever come back?’ That sort of thing.

John: I was trying to hide what I felt in a bottle and it wasn’t doing me any good. Forget about image, just physically and mentally it was killing me. And I only know how to get out of that kind of situation by drinking. I really tried to drown myself in the bottle and it took an awful lot because I don’t seem strong physically that much, but it just seems to take an amazing lot to put me down. And I was with the heaviest drinkers in the industry which is Harry Nilsson and Bobby Keyes and all of them, and we couldn’t pull ourselves out. I think Harry might be still trying, poor bugger. ‘God bless you Harry, wherever you are.’

But Jesus, you know, I had to get away from that as well because somebody was going to die, or Keith Moon did. It was Keith, Harry, me and god knows who else around. And it was like, ‘Who’s going to die first?’ Unfortunately Keith was the one. But I got out. You know, we’re surrounded by a rock and roll album, and Phil Spector running away with the tapes, and Harry Nilsson, and lots of drink and craziness.

And then I sober up and I bring the tapes back to New York because I want to get home to Yoko and I also want to get the tapes and the thing out.

Interview with Chris Charlesworth, Melody Maker, February 1975.

John: I’m happy as Larry and she is. We’ve known each other for nine years. I met her in 1966. We had a sort of breakdown last year, one way or another, but we called each other often, even when I was going crazy out on the West Coast, and I probably said a lot of barmy things to her which I’ll regret.

I was just going over for a visit two weeks ago and it fell in place again. It was like I never left, although I’d been there a few times. Suddenly it fell back into place and I realised that this was where I belonged. I think we both knew we’d get back together again sooner or later, even if it was five years, and that’s why we never bothered with divorce.

Interview with Pete Hamill, Rolling Stone, March 1975.

John: And why did we end up back together? (pompous voice) ‘We ended up together again because it was diplomatically viable…’

Come on!

We got back together because we love each other.

The separation didn’t work out. And the reaction to the breakup was all that madness. I was like a chicken without a head.

Interview with David Sheff, October 1980.

Yoko: When we got back together, we just had a very quiet ceremony and exchanged rings in our apartment in that big white room. It had nothing to do with any particular religion and it was very nice.

John: We wanted to have a baby. We took it very carefully because of her past history, and mine. So it was nine months of virtually sitting still waiting for the baby.

We gave up smoking before we conceived, and we were on a strict diet, and all that kind of stuff, so we did that for nine months before he was born. The whole thing revolved around him. And then when she was capable, she went and took care of business, and I took care of house business.

I wanted to spend Sean’s first five years absolutely giving him all the time I possibly could.

When I stepped back and said, ‘What has been going on? Here we are. I’m going to be forty. Sean’s going to be five. Isn’t it great?’

We survived. He survived his five years. I am going to be forty. And life begins at forty, so they promised. Oh, I believe it too. Because I feel fine. I’m like excited. It’s like twenty-one. You know, hitting twenty-one. It’s like ‘Wow! What’s going to happen?’ It suddenly all came through me like that in the form of song.